May 1998

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Movie review: Nightwatch

By Lawrence Cabanero

After more than a year and a half of release date pushing,
Nightwatch has finally creeped its way into theaters. Starring Ewan
McGregor, as Martin, a lone nightwatchman in a morgue, and Patricia
Arquette his girlfriend,
Nightwatch lacks any spectacular or even interesting performances you'd
might expect, in boring roles you'd might not expect these actors to be
playing.

Through nearly entire first hour of the film, director Ole Bornedal uses
every
trick in the book to make your skin crawl or to at least try to make you
dump a bit of your popcorn. The building is ridiculously decorated with
spooky quirks--the front door that doesn't always shut when you want it to,
the large, plastic-covered columns at the entrance that move like ghosts in
the darkness, the room with large mysterious vats that the former watchman
warns "Don't ever go in there." A light flickers at the end of the hall;
moths swarm inside the dim light fixtures in his office.

Martin's duties as a night watchman include the absurd task of walking
through a room with dead bodies lined up on both sides, each with a sensor
dangling above them in case one decides to get up. At times, the cheesiness
of its endless mini-spooks makes you think that this movie was meant satire
the horror flick or at least poke fun at them, but its disappointingly
unoriginal conclusion actually depends on these predictably little but
significant factors. It is almost as if at first, Bornedal tries to go
over the top with his tongue in his cheek, but gives up when the plot
actually comes into play.

The remainder of the movie is painfully predictable. A series of murders
occurs, involving such elements as sex and and gouging a victim's eyes out.
Of course, McGregor's character is framed as the only person around when a
corpse is sexually assaulted. Arquette is limited to the role of the
skeptic-turn-angry sidekick. A major fault in the film is that there are
only one or two other people in the movie for us to guess as the actual
murderer. When the answer is revealed, the audience is forced to endure
30 minutes of unsuspenseful gore involving characters they no longer care
about, if in fact they cared for them at all.

Nightwatch is entertainment spit out of a machine that wasn't sent
through quality control before being shipped to your local cineplex. Keep
in mind though that this movie wasn't meant to be Oscar-worthy. As
pathetic as it
is, its goal is to scare you a bit and to make you flinch at the
stomach-turning images flashed on the screen. And it at least succeeds in
that.